The Friday guide.

Sleeping With The Fishes

Our Intrepid Reporter Visits The Shedd And Finds A New Way To Spend Her After-hours

April 16, 1993|By Text by Achy Obejas.

The water is turquoise. There is a golden haze to it, but it is mostly green and blue. The light coming through is level and smooth. Every minute or so, it's broken by a specter-sometimes swift and thin, other times languorous and mysterious.

It's about 1 a.m. and you are wormed up in a sleeping bag, staring up at the coral reef tank at the Shedd Aquarium. There are about 14 of you, stretched out like rays with your feet at the base of the tank, each doing a kind of individual meditation. The water gurgles a bit; the whole room hums.

This is the third ever adult overnight program at the Shedd Aquarium, and it's packed. Two hundred of you have paid $60 each ($50 for members) and are spread out over the aquarium's six galleries. There are people snuggled into every color sleeping bag, inflatable mattresses, cots, topping museum benches.

The idea of the overnight is to help you get close to the thousands of fish and marine mammals at the aquarium. That had seemed appealing. What you'd neglected to realize was that you'd also be awfully close to 199 virtual strangers-mostly white, middle-aged suburbanites, many in couples.

Between galleries five and six, in between the piranhas (South American, from the characidae family) and the electric eels (from the Amazon, capable of stunning prey with 500 volts of electricity, but not true eels), a pair of women from Detroit lay fully dressed on some blankets covering the benches. "We didn't know we were supposed to bring sleeping bags or pillows," admits one of them. "We had to borrow everything from the museum."

Near the fuzzy, playful river otters (90-pound weaklings compared with their sea cousins, who can crush mussels and abalone between their massive molars), a woman cracks open Marshall Field's bags and, using a hand-held air pump, puts together a makeshift bedroom: a double bed, a pair of inflatable pillows. The boxes and receipts serve as night tables, coasters for cans of soda.

Between the anemones, those blood red marine bouquets, and the tiny flickering flashlight fish (they get a black curtain, so their lilliputian lights can be best seen, but suddenly, now, in the middle of the night, you envy their privacy), a young man holds a circle of young girls enthralled with a fish story. They twitter and laugh.

Not far from them, a woman helps a man out of his wheelchair and onto a mattress. A breathless man hauls a futon through the gallery, followed by a woman buried under folded blankets, sheets and pillows. She carries a flashlight and a thermos. All around, couples reach from one sleeping bag to the other, to knot up and tangle. Singles kick off blankets, sheets; others curl into tight little balls against the walls.

You, however, are lying on the floor, arms crossed behind your head, and you are waiting. You staked out the window on the coral reef tank with a view of a little sandy cove. Coral rises like cactus around its sides. It's fake coral-made of fiberglass and epoxy resins-and only the parrotfish are fooled. The parrotfish, brilliant and tropical in its coloring, had to be taken out of the tank when they kept trying to eat the skin off the coral and getting sick.

You picked this window, though, because of something other than the view of elkhorn coral. There is a pregnant black triggerfish among the 150 creatures in that tank that is rumored to be about to spawn, and this little hideaway is expected to be the birthing area. You want to see this little miracle.

This was not your first choice for sleeping turf, however. You wanted to go down to the oceanarium, to snuggle up against the cool glass of the penguin habitat. When you first got to the aquarium, you shot straight down to see them, but the lights were already out. They were chirping and squawking in the darkness. Still, you peered through the shadows and were able to see them, some standing stiff as Popsicles, others lying on their stomachs, looking less like wedding caterers than like the birds they actually are. Their wings were folded to their sides. They appeared to be nesting.

Your second choice was the make-believe Pacific Northwest coastline that encompasses most of the oceanarium. A lush, human-made rain forest integrates some live plants; an authentic tidal pool with sea stars, crabs and transparent mushrooming anemones ring one corner of the rain forest. Recorded bird sounds and other animal noises fill the air there, and you'd hoped to wake up to the natural sunshine pouring through the windows. You wanted to get up and wave at the belugas, ringside at the tank.

But the museum honchos, noting insurance concerns about people sleepwalking and falling in the water, the beluga's delicate temperament, and the need to keep all 200 of you more or less in one place, said no, no way.